teleport

Library Media/Tech Plan Final Draft

Here is a copy of the final draft of the MG Library Media/Technology Plan.

MG Tech Plan Draft: Please Comment!

The Tech Plan Draft has 6 main sections; you can view them separately or together: (Hint--if you only read three sections, consider making them Executive Summary (it's short, and it's an overview), Vision (it's really short, and I'm hoping for feedback), and Implementation Steps (it's kind of long, but it details who is doing what--you might be in there!)

Executive Summary: Overview of the plan and its guiding idea.

Vision: Just one sentence! Take a look and weigh in on it!

Needs Assessment: A description of the EnGauge technology assessment and how it generated our goals.

Goals and Objectives: The four major goals of the plan, and sub-goals for each.

Implementation Steps: Who will do what to get the plan done, and when.

Bibliography: A comprehensive bibliography about information literacy, library media, and technology, created by Kathy Sanders

Please weigh in on any aspect of this draft! Thanks,

Bill Herman

Greatest Hopes for "Contemporary Literacy" at MG

In developing the combined library-media/technology plan for MG, we have come to define the plan's central purpose as: helping students cultivate contemporary literacy.

“Contemporary literacy,” a phrase coined by Ferdi Serim, means being able to use contemporary technology to ask questions, gather and analyze information to answer them, and communicate the results. In a word, it means knowing how to use contemporary technology to support and empower thinking. Therefore, cultivating contemporary literacy in students means teaching thinking skills as well as teaching how to use computer applications to perform them effectively. Our plan reflects the breadth of the concept of contemporary literacy: its goals and objectives are designed to develop students’ computer skills and thinking skills, with the ultimate aim of helping students use computers to think and communicate better.

With all this in mind, what are your greatest hopes for the development of contemporary literacy among students at Monona Grove over the next 3 years? What are you biggest worries as we try to accomplish this goal?

Proposed Tech Plan Goals: Please Comment!

As a result of our participation in the Engauge educational technology assessment process, and after much discussion of what we observed and learned, the Monona Grove core technology planning team identified four central goals for improving educational technology in the district, each with accompanying objectives.

These goals and objectives will determine the "implementation steps" of the plan--the detailed description of who will do what, and when, to ensure that we get the most educational value from our investment in technology.

Everyone in the MG community--students, staff, parents, and general residents--are encouraged to review these proposed goals, and offer feedback by clicking on the "comments" link at the end of each. Your comments along with everyone else's will be posted, making a kind of online discussion possible. If you have thoughts or reactions, please pitch them in. Don't be shy!

Bill Herman
Technology Director
Monona Grove Schools

PS--Here is a copy of the Meeting Agenda for the May 25 meeting of the district technology committee.

MG Tech Plan Goal 1: Curriculum

1. Develop and communicate clear curriculum goals for educational technology

a. Develop and communicate a pithy, effective vision statement explaining when and why students should use technology

b. Create a specific list of technology skills all students must demonstrate on completion of 2nd, 5th, 8th, and 12th grade

c. Develop and implement a method of assessing and reporting on student mastery of these skills.

d. Map technology use into the district curriculum as part of the district curriculum mapping process

MG Tech Plan Goal 2: Professional Development

2. Provide abundant and diverse professional development opportunities designed to enable staff to accomplish district educational technology curriculum goals

a. Implement a way for teachers to receive horizontal salary schedule credits by participating in approved district workshops outside of work hours. Approve technology staff development offerings for this credit.

b. Ensure that teachers’ professional development plans call for them to 1) design lessons that build student information literacy; and 2) learn the skills they will need to effectively teach these lessons.

c. Develop a framework for assessing teachers’ information literacy, and their effectiveness at teaching information literacy. Include this assessment in every teacher’s evaluation.

d. Focus staff development offerings on technology as it supports information literacy; in particular, on the inquiry process and on reading for understanding.

e. Offer a three-credit course for teachers on building information literacy across the K-12 curriculum. The course should be offered as often as there is enough interest to fill a class.

f. Offer mini-classes (1-2 hours) in how to use basic applications and create simple lessons incorporating them at all schools throughout the year and during the summer.

g. When district inservices are focused on instructional methods, include technology use if it is educationally helpful.

h. Help teachers design technology-enhanced lessons during collaborative teacher planning time.

i. Design workshops so that they include time for teachers to practice the skill being taught, and to create a lesson incorporating its use.

MG Tech Plan Goal 3: Process

Develop a more effective district process for ensuring the effective implementation of the district technology plan

a. Convene effective, representative technology committees which meet regularly at the building and district level. These committees should monitor and advance the implementation of the technology plan, and ensure fair input into allocation decisions.

b. Each building will appoint an effective building technology committee. The building committees’ primary functions will be 1) to identify local staff development needs and to develop methods of serving them locally; and 2) to monitor the building's movement toward accomplishing the district goals, on an ongoing basis. Each building committee will include the building’s library media specialist.

c. The technology director, the 6 library media specialists, and two or three other teachers will form the core district technology planning committee. This committee will meet monthly to discuss progress and issues in implementing the technology plan around the district, and to identify next steps.

d. The large district technology committee will meet annually to review the plan, monitor progress in implementation, and identify aspects of implementation in need of greater attention.

MG Tech Plan Goal 4: Funding

Develop a strategic funding response to the loss of TEACH block grants

a. Convene a small committee, including at least two board members and two community members with expertise in technology allocation. The committee should

i. Identify was of reducing technology cost while sustaining current services

ii. Identify untapped sources of revenue and resources, and ways of seeking them on an ongoing basis

iii. Develop strategies to advocate for state and federal legislative changes to increase funding for technology in education

iv. Develop strategies for creating and strengthening partnerships between local businesses and MG schools

v. Create a ranked list of proposed service cuts and associated savings per cut

b. Present findings and recommendations of this committee to the Board

c. (For the School Board): Determine appropriate annual amount of technology spending for the school district, and determine how to allocate this amount from district funds.

Developing a Vision

Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.

As this proverb suggests, constructive activity is impossible unless guided by a plan, and a plan cannot make sense unless it grows from a vision. Our challenge as a district technology committee is to develop a vision that will guide our planning, and our action.

Here is what a typical educational technology vision might look like: “We are going to meet state information literacy standards.” This kind of vision can serve as a guide for drafting a plan, but it has a shortcoming. The people who write the plan, and the people who have to enact it, might not understand why the standards are important. They might not even believe that they are. If we are guided only by the intention to follow instructions, there is a risk that we will end up just going through the motions.

A vision should be illuminating to the planners who are guided by it, and to the people who enact the plan “on the ground.” It should help us understand why the standards are important. We on the technology committee are responsible for developing this vision, and for spreading it.

Well, what vision? Here is a powerful core idea drawn from Carol Kuhlthau, a former high school librarian and now a leader in the field of information literacy studies.

In her book “Seeking Meaning,” Kuhlthau zeroes in on a major question: what is learning? For her, learning is formulation: first we accumulate information whose meaning is unclear, and then we create our own formulations that explain, describe, or tie together the information. As George Kelly put it, this formulation provides “a way of binding together a multitude of facts so that one may comprehend them all at once.”

In this view, learning is an act of personal creation or construction. The thing we create is an explanation, or a generalization, or some kind of representation. It lets us see elements that used to seem disconnected in a new way: as being joined together into a pattern.

Kuhlthau’s work suggests a guiding vision in the field of educational technology. If learning is gathering and explaining information, then we should be sure students are doing one or both of these when they use computers in school. Before we build computer use into a lesson or unit, we should ask: Does it help students find or pull together information that could be valuable to them? Does it help them explain, formulate, or represent the information in an original way for themselves and others?

As we develop our technology plan, we should be guided by these questions. When we consider an educational technology goal or any student computer use that is meant to support existing curriculum, we should always be able to give a strong “yes” answer to at least one of these questions. We should use computers avidly in these cases, and otherwise not at all.

Reinventing the Wheel?

It is important for us to think for ourselves about how our students should use technology in school, because "best practice" in educational technology is not yet a settled matter.

Good discussions are often cut short when someone says, "we don't have to reinvent the wheel, here!" The suggestion is that we're wasting time trying to solve a problem that's already been figured out. And sometimes this is true. Since nobody's improved on the basic concept of the wheel in milennia, it's probably safe to assume a major problem is solved and can't be solved better.

A similar assumption is often made about educational technology. Discussions about how students should use computers in schools, and what they should know how to do with them, are often cut short by someone who points to state or national standards, or to "best practice," and says, "we don't have to reinvent the wheel, here!"

If we actually had a wheel, I might feel comfortable passing over discussion about what students should be doing with computers. That is to say, if there were good reason to believe that best practice in educational technology is already well established, then we could save our breath on this. All we would need to discuss is logistics--how to modify instruction to bring it into conformity with best practice.

However, I think there are good reasons to be skeptical about any claim that best practice in educational technology is a settled matter. Here are three:

1) Standards differ: Although groups of thoughtful people have sat down and developed standards of student technology use in every state and at the national level, there's a lot of difference between the different standards. Beyond that, the other developed countries in the world use technology differently in schools--and much less--than we do. Where there isn't consensus among thoughtful specialists, how can we claim that "best practice" has been figured out?

2) Research is uncertain: A recent metastudy into the effectiveness of educational technology--cited by NCREL--was able to draw only weak conclusions about the educational benefit of using educational technology, and could not offer general conclusions about best practice. The authors incorporated the results of many individual studies into their metastudy, but noted that many existing studies could not be included because they had been poorly designed and did not yield quantitative results. Research has not established what "best practice" is.

3) This is all pretty new: Computer technology has been a major force in American K-12 classrooms for less than 10 years. Already during that time its forms and capacities have changed. It would be surprising if there could already be established best practice regarding something so powerful that appeared so recently and changes so fast. Much more likely than our becoming able to harness it effectively is that we will simply continue to react to it. In many cases what is called "best practice" might really be just adjusting practice to make use of the latest tools.

These are not reasons to give up on trying to develop a clear picture of how students should use technology, and they are not criticisms of the excellent work and quality thought that many people have put into developing standards. They are, however, reasons to doubt that "best practice" in educational technology is already established, and that therefore we can pass over discussing, and doing our best to figure out for ourselves, what it is. In this field, there are a lot of useful items, but there is no wheel.

I hope we can base our discussion about what Monona Grove students should be able to do with technology, and when, by reviewing some of the best work that has been done in the field. We will have to read and react to leading standards and important writers in the field. Please take some time to review and comment on this work as I attach it to the blog!